While Ryse and Forza 5 and the other graphical heavyweight video games showboat their way across Xbox One's launch window, Zoo Tycoon opts for a different sort of horsepower. Here, down on the virtual zoo, the thrills are earthier: feed bananas to giraffes, hose down dusty rhinos, pull faces at chimpanzees, pick up faecal matter. They are also more civic: set the price of admission, plan an internet ad campaign, ensure the toilets are working. It's a back-of-the-box feature list that's unlikely to inspire many children into chimp-like squeals of delight.

Nevertheless, Zoo Tycoon (an unnerving title that conjures images of battery farming lions, or sending grizzly bears off to work on a factory line to stitch running shoes) emerges as one of the strongest launch titles for Microsoft's latest console, its bright palette bringing a menagerie of lovingly rendered animals to life, even as its keen strategic heart pushes you towards profit and expansion.

It's rhythms are straightforward: spend profits made from ticket sales on expanding and improving your zoo. This is done by creating new exhibits in the style of various types of habitat before helicoptering in animals, providing them with food, water, washing facilities and, finally, things to do. Profits are buffered by building shops, restaurants, food huts and sideshows, many of which you must keep well stocked. The happier your animals, and the more types of species that you house, the greater the draw of your zoo on the public.

The game can be played from a bird's eye view, or, with a swift zoom, you can walk around the park on foot. From this latter viewpoint you are able to interact with many of the animals you bring into the park. The Xbox One's Kinect camera can be used painlessly in play to, for example, direct a hose to wash down animals, and will even zoom in on your face, as a young chimp presses his face to the virtual screen and copies your winks and smiles. The expertise of developer Frontier (the company headed by Elite creator David Braben) shines here: much of the impressive technology that fired 2010's Kinectimals and 2011's Disneyland Adventures has been built upon for the close-up animal interactions.

In time you'll be profitable enough to hire staff who can carry out the basic zookeeper duties on your behalf, leaving you to focus fully on improving advertising, encouraging animals to mate and completing various timed tasks. These range from taking interesting photographs of specified species for local magazines, to improving the health and wellbeing of all animals in your zoo.

The long-term aim of the game is to return the zoo's inhabitants to the wild; when they "level-up" sufficiently through careful nurture, they can be flown back to their natural habitats and tracked on a world map. It's a somewhat idealised view of the zoo business, but as a video game goal, it works as well as any other. The game struggles a little over the mid-to-long term: the difficulty doesn't fluctuate much and, soon enough, you're merely turning the cogs rather than responding to thrilling challenges, but Zoo Tycoon is pleasant and engaging, even in its absence of spectacle.